David Getsy: The context of a group of essays on sculpture, sexuality, and abstraction prompts me to start this conversation by talking about how we both write about the valence of sexuality in artworks and performances that would not, at first, seem to encourage it. While we've both written about explicit material too, I think a concern we share is how desire, the sexual, and the gendered operate beyond their straightforward depictions. We also both have a background in the study of the nineteenth century, in which discussions ofand evidence for desire and the sexual were heavily coded.